In A Burning Room

by TS Ward

  “You’ll take the pain away,” he told me, “You always do.”

  The lava that bled from him made a pool around his chair.

  It burned, and it cracked, and it sizzled as it filled the void around us. Sparks drifted slowly among the gray ash and the dark gray smoke. The heat could melt steel and iron. It could melt bone.

  It melted into a mould in the darkness that rose up in white hot light behind him. It gathered the ash to cling to it like fur—fur on a monstrous beast that stood on its haunches and set loose a guttural and vicious roar.

  My heart pounded in my chest as a black bear stood larger than any grizzly or polar, teeth sharp and shining. Its eyes glowed with fire just like Mercury’s.

  Little bear, my mind screamed, and then my heart stopped.

  The bear had the shine of silver metal instead of a front leg.

  Oh, little bear.

  ———

  A scream of panic tore up my lungs.

  My hands scrambled for a grip on something as the world flipped upright again. I tasted the copper of the Wastes instead of the ash of a monstrous fire god.

  “It’s okay! It’s okay,” Jack caught my hands and pulled me against his chest, pinned me in a hug that stopped my panicked movements. “Shhh. You’re okay.”

  My eyes fell on sand that coated the old tiles of the floor, and I breathed deeply. I breathed the sharp sting of static deep into my bones, calmed the shock that tried to keep him from touching me, and stilled the hard beat of my heart against my ribcage.

  The salt of tears stung my eyes as I remembered the image of a bear whose eyes were filled with the burning rage of James’ Sceptre blood.

  “He’ll be okay. I promise.” Jack whispered against my neck.

  I broke his grip on me and crawled forward until I found my feet. The cold anger I felt on the sim room floor coursed through my veins as liquid ice. It filled my lungs until I drowned in it, until the words in me were more buoyant than the rage and they tumbled out like a waterfall of glacial slush.

  “You should have left me there. You should have left me in the Embassy. You should have let me die on that plane. He would still be here. He would be okay. He would have been okay, he would have been more than okay, he would have been better off without me—”

  “Soren, don't say that.”

  “—without you bringing the Empire to him, he would have been better off if he was never born in the first place. How can anyone be cruel enough to bring a child into this world, where they can be hurt so horribly?”

  Jack looked up at me from the floor, paled, lips parted, and hissed a breath between his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” he choked out. “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head and turned away as guilt settled bitter in my stomach. “It’s not your fault.”

  “You just said it was!”

  “Yeah, well,” I breathed, and I swallowed the glacial lump in my chest.

  I gathered the bitter anger that formed it, and I left the room. I left the room, and the building, and the dead city that roared with the excitement of rebels.

  I left him there and found the stairs out of this hive of skyscraper husks.

  The sun seemed too high in the sky for what had happened.

  22

  Rage rumbled inside my chest along with the rumble of bike and quad engines. I was a mess of nerves where I stood at the bow of the Sailer, a small wooden airplane held in my hand.

  He left it on the boat. He left it behind.

  It would have been ash if James had found it.

  The bikes didn’t reek of gasoline. It was an electric smell, warm plastic and rubber that worked feverishly against the terrain. It permeated the air along with the whirring sound of their generators. Small solar panels were perched between the handlebars of each one, tied with rope to cargo on the backs, and carried on small trailers behind some them.

  “All aboard!” Pucks called out as he climbed out of the hold.

  The deck of the Sailer started to vibrate; it wasn’t magic, like Percy wholeheartedly believed, but a similar engine to the bikes and quads. The heart of the land boat was awake and beating, and mine matched the pulse.

  A cloud of dust circled us.

  The bike pulled ahead and bounced over the boards between this building and the next. I felt vertigo and worry climb up my throat, imagining that bridge breaking or falling under him.

  Jack didn’t leave when I left.

  I climbed up the tower and my name didn't trail behind me. When I reached the top, I stood alone in a desert that stretched for miles.

  The squeal of the lifts brought up the last of the bikes. It grated against my ears, and so did the crack of the Sailer’s body as Jack and the others pulled the ropes taut to help us over the rooftops.

  I slipped the wooden plane into my pocket with the ruby and gold ring, to remind me who had him. To remind me who it was who hurt him, scared him, turned him into an anger filled black bear made from smoke and ash instead of my soft little one.

  My chest ached with worry for him, and that damn soldier as he rode a dirt bike over rooftops hundreds of feet above the ground.

  “Fitz, the sail,” Pucks barked, and then, “Soren, how is it looking up there? Are we in line with the bridge?”

  I gripped the rail, leaned over the edge of the boat, and looked down at the crack in the middle. There’s no way that can hold this thing. I nodded anyway and threw a thumbs up to the old man.

  “You’re good!”

  The boat groaned as it climbed over the bridge, and I groaned as I sank down to the deck.

  This place made me feel ill and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be off the ruined cities and out of the Wastes and somewhere safe with my little bear, somewhere where cruel words hadn't tumbled out of my mouth. Somewhere like the green meadow with its soft soil and the honeyed, warm sunlight.

  “What happened down there, kid?” Ellie sank down next to me. Her bones creaked just as much as these buildings.

  I threw her a sharp look. “You don’t know?”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit attitude,” she muttered. She waved a hand vaguely toward the window washing lift that crested the building with Tiger and Rabbit on board, Tiger with noise cancelling headphones on. “The girl listens and if you’re good to her, she talks. So tell me about it. What did he do?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter? He has Percy and you’re going to tell me it doesn’t matter? I think it does, to you most of all, and I doubt that it’s left your mind at all since it happened. Tell me, Soren.” She wound her fingers together and crossed her ankles.

  Her blue scarf was a bright blot of colour against the red dust of the Wastes. She waited for me to speak for what felt like ages before she started in again.

  “He wants you to marry him. Why?”

  “Why? Ellie, why the hell do you think?” I hissed, my palms flat against the deck on either side of me. “So he can—so he can have what he wants. From me, from my Sceptre blood, from the Empire… he wants me, and this thing I can do—taking away pain, that’s… euphoric. It’s like a drug. And the Empire, he wants to rule it. He wants to be like my father. He wants people to listen to everything he says.”

  The woman sighed as she leaned back against the boat’s balustrade. “That little bastard. Did he hurt you? She thought she heard glass breaking, I thought he might have…”

  “Might have what? Put my head through it?” I scoffed a laugh. “Yeah, he did.”

  “You’re strong enough to stop him,” she offered.

  “It’s harder than that, Ellie. I’m not in the moment. I tell myself that I can every time, and every time it’s harder, and I don’t know why. Even with Percy, I was frozen. I could have ended it right there but I didn’t and I let him take Percy and I blamed Jack for it.” I breathed out as I pressed my hands over my eyes. Vibrations rumbled through the boat straight into my bones. “And I—I had Jack
’s knife. I could have just stabbed him, but I forgot.”

  Ellie pressed a hand to my shoulder and grumbled an agreement. “Tell me about it.”

  I shrugged her off. “He’s your son.”

  “He’s a damn devil, always has been,” she said. “You know, some people kill their kids before the Empire can get to them, to save them the suffering. Can you blame me for thinking the same?”

  “Only it’s not him suffering.” I shot a look at the plume of orange dust that rose in the sky behind the Sailer, where a quad roared loud with Rabbit and Tiger on its back.

  It wasn’t just Arden, and it wasn’t just me. It was anyone who was there to be lashed out at. And her admonishment about people killing their kids—it left a bad taste in my mouth, especially with how casual it was.

  “All the more reason. Yet I’m just as human as you,” she laughed quietly.

  I pulled my knees up and crossed my arms over my chest. I sank into the shape of the boat.

  My body was exhausted and sang with fragmented static, and my mind was even more so. Sleep was elusive and even when I found it, I found myself in some strange reality, an unreality, and I woke worse off.

  I didn’t want to sleep. I just wanted to close my eyes until we were off the dead city, until we left it in the dust and the mountains rose on the horizon.

  Ellie sighed. “You’ll have to be strong. Stronger. In order to use yourself to your full potential, in order to win. You know it, he knows it, she knows it. We both know what you’re capable of, and if that devil child has to witness it, I’m not stopping you.”

  “I’m not a killer,” I whispered, and then Tiger’s face popped into my mind, and then the Pluto soldiers who died because of me, and I breathed the softest touch of words. “I can’t. Not again.”

  She laughed louder then, and grumbled as she stood. “There’s violence in you, kid. You can deny it all you want, but it’ll be an eye for an eye. In the end none of us ever really have a choice in the matter.”

  23

  I dreaded the rise of the mountain peaks on the horizon and the way that they turned into a darker shade of blue than the sky, the way they ate the clouds like a coveted late-night snack of candy floss. I dreaded the end.

  There was a city in those mountains, the shining diamond in the bony spine of the Empire.

  It was Warren uncovered.

  It was a glass and steel and marble ocean that captured the stars like a net and stored them in its glacial waters, awash in the silver light of our closest and palest heavenly body. I longed for it, for the green that ran through its veins from its agricultural second skin, but I dreaded the end that came with arriving.

  We were going home.

  Home.

  That word wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right. It didn’t fit with the image I had in my head of a room that smelled like cedar sap and old cracked wood, or the sounds and vibrations of the Lumen that marched periodically outside my door.

  It didn’t fit with the soldiers that stood in perfect lines, their movements unified.

  That word didn’t fit with a small ten by ten-by-ten box that held only darkness and an attempt at a softer place to sleep than the floor.

  Home wasn’t the sim room, or the Mirror Hall, or the marble floors and electric white walls.

  Home wasn’t a place in my mind. Home wasn’t—anything.

  But I saw it over the surface of a still lake in my dreams.

  Redbird shone in fractal shards through the dark. The world cracked like a mirror with a fist through it, but it was quiet after the roar of a buried city. It hummed with the sound of one alive and breathing.

  It was a dream itself, a dream within a dream, a castle in the clouds.

  I waded through the mirrored reflection of the stars; the ice-cold water wrapped around my ankles like new boots despite the truest depth of Black Sky Lake.

  Once, I broke the lens in my telescope and the stars I saw became a kaleidoscope. It was a bit more magic, then. A bit more like this dream.

  On the shore there was only shadow between the reflection on the water and the stars, the moon, that lit up the sky.

  I was afraid of the dark. I always was.

  When I was young, I kept every light on in my room because I swore I could see the outlined glow of people hiding in those dark places, until my father renamed our personal guards to shadows—that was where they were, in the shadows, in the dark, always at our heels, always there to keep us safe.

  I was still afraid, but I felt a little better then.

  On the shore, a shadow separated from the rest. The moon bled silver over his shoulders. It drew a shine over his face as he tilted his head back and looked up at the fractured sky with its pinhole lights.

  The sound of the water under my feet was harsh and loud in the still air. It echoed off the mountains like an avalanche but despite it, I ran achingly slowly through the lake’s surface to reach the shore, to reach the shadow there.

  The sound was horribly similar to the crystal champagne flutes that shattered on the marble floor of the Mirror Hall—where even the sound was repeated in infinite waves.

  “What did you do?” I screamed, and my voice bounced like a skipping stone. “How could you? How dare you. How dare you bring him into this life and this family and this poisonous bloody city? He is innocent in this.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand it,” the shadow said in a breath.

  I crashed like a wave onto the shore and reached for him, but he was a mirror of me, a mirror trapped behind a glass wall in a glass box in a glass castle. He was a prism of refracted light and possibility and I couldn’t stand the sight of him.

  “Understand it? I don’t expect you to understand what it means to me, what he means to me, when you’re so damn heartless and sadistic. He is a child—”

  “So was I!” He shouted, and they were the loudest words I had ever heard from him. “And you will never understand being born without a childhood. You might not remember yours right now, but you will. You have that privilege.”

  “How could you think I had a childhood? How can you know what it's like and take it away from Percy?”

  My palms met with the glass of his cage and resistance met with them. My voice was a hundred razor blades in my throat and I sank to my knees with the ache of it. The sand underneath me was white and shone like snow, and the sand under him was inky black. “You of all people should know what they’ll do to him. What she will do to him. I’ll kill you if anything happens to that kid, Pilot, you know I will.”

  He crouched with narrow fingertips that trailed down the glass. “Everything according to plan.”

  “What do you want from me?” I wheezed the words out.

  A fist wrapped around my ribs to squeeze the air from me, a heavy thumb pressed to the hollow of my throat, and I hurt so much I wanted to give up. I wanted to lie in the sand at his feet and forget all over again, to forget myself and everything that stuck a knife in my ribs so sharply.

  “I want you to allow yourself to remember,” he said. “To allow this god in.”

  My fingers dug trenches in the sand. “I don’t want to remember. I want to forget.”

  “You already did that, and look how far you’ve come. Not very. They say ignorance is bliss, but is it really, sister? You cannot hide in a fog of your own creation for the rest of your life. There is something in you that will change the world, and you will embrace it whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not.”

  His hands reached through his glass prison as he knelt next to me, pressed them over mine, rested his chin on my shoulder. He was so much taller than when I last saw him in person. A beanstalk of a kid who was going to outgrow our father before he turned nineteen.

  He turned my hands over and the moonlight crushed silver through the grains of pale sand, my hands in shadow. Constellations sparked across my palms and burned my skin like fire. The universe held in a trembling and aching grasp.

  “Astra
doesn’t know about this yet,” he murmured.

  “She’ll hurt you,” I told him. “You know that.”

  He shrugged and wrapped his arms around me as I stared at the starlight in my hands. “I know a lot of things. I know what I’ll survive. I know what you’ll survive. I won’t spoil the ending for you again.”

  I breathed a cloud of white fog. “Why is this happening?”

  “Because you need to wake up. So wake up.”

  His hands came up. One gripped my shirt while the other covered my mouth and nose. I startled and threw my weight down as he tried to pull me up, my hands tugging at his steel grip.

  “Don’t fight this. It’s time to wake up. It's time to let this god in. It’s necessary.”

  Pilot spoke softly, casually, as if he wasn’t dragging me with heel-dug trenches in the sand, as if his hands weren’t suffocating me. My lungs fought for air between the cracks of his fingers while my fingers fought for more cracks.

  Desperate pain pressed against my ribs, and then the cold chill of water soaked my clothes, and that shattered-crystal sound filled my ears along with the lake. A scream pushed against his palm while my hands gripped his wrist.

  “The salt will wash you clean,” he murmured.

  He released my mouth to hold me by the arms as he dunked me under the surface. Darkness and the swirling stars filled my vision.

  The salt?

  The lake in Redbird was fresh water, but—I felt it in my lungs as I gasped for air. I tasted it in my mouth as it flooded through me. Salt.

  The air shocked my skin when he pulled me up again. “You made a star with your bare hands, and you will swallow the rest. All is well, sister.”

  “Stop! Stop—”

  He pushed me under again.

  Beneath the choppy surface of my struggling, somehow, beyond the stars that drifted in swirling patterns before my eyes, the electric outline of him loomed as a giant. He was white, rather than blue like the others, but behind him—another form hovered.

  Something vaguely humanoid.

  I felt its non-mouth pull into a grin as the lake and the reflected universe spilled into my lungs like liquid silver and I coughed the taste of salt—